You're Not Going
by asmallthing
Summary: He promised her that he'd never leave her alone when he goes on a mission; but now he's breaking that promise, and her heart.


Nicky came to a dead stop in the doorway of the room that she and Jason shared. Her eyes followed his movements as she watched him hurriedly packing a bag. He briefly made eye contact with her but didn't say a word. She didn't ask what he was doing. She knew. She knew that he'd been given a mission and was packing to leave.

But he hadn't told her… and that meant that he wasn't planning on bringing her with him.

She brushed past him as he checked his gun before sliding it into its holster and she reached into the top of the closet for her go bag. She pulled it down and turned to find him standing directly behind her.

"You're not going", he told her quietly.

"Fuck. You." She made her reply through gritted teeth, without looking at him. Then she removed her own gun from the bag and checked that the safety was on before she returned it to the bag, which contained several passports, a change of clothes, cash, and a small medical kit.

He backed her firmly against the wall and repeated, "You're. Not. Going.". He waited for her to look up at him; to acknowledge what he had told her. And when she did he saw, not the anger that he expected, but fear. Fear and betrayal.

"You promised", she told him flatly. And he had. He had promised that he'd never leave her again. She would go with him when he went on assignment. He wouldn't leave her alone again; not after what happened last time.

"This is different, Nicky. I… Where I'm going," he shook his head "I _can't_ take you. It's not safe." He wanted her to understand, knew that she wouldn't, and realized that it didn't matter. He wasn't going to take her and she would just have to deal with it.

"It's _not_ different. Not to me." He had _promised._ He promised he wouldn't do this. She didn't care where he was going. She didn't care why he was going. The only thing that mattered was that he was leaving her and she was terrified.

"Please." She begged. She was desperate. _This can't be happening; He isn't really going to leave me._

"No." He spoke gently but gave absolutely no ground. "I know that I promised, but this… this _is_ different. You'll be safer away from me."

The ever-present fear, the fear that she was usually so good at keeping locked firmly away, began to well up from deep inside. _He isn't even going to tell me where he's going. Something's wrong._

"Who's after you?" she asked him softly but as she asked, a little voice inside her head spoke up and she realized an awful truth. "No. Not you… me." She watched as her words hit home. She was right. He was leaving in some stupid fit of gallantry, trying to protect her.

_Goddam it. How does she do that?_ He had planned to keep it a secret from her. It would be difficult enough for her to cope with him being gone and she didn't need the added worry of knowing that she had been targeted. No one should have to live with that, especially after what she had been through.

It wouldn't do any good to try and deny it. Her instincts were right and she knew it. Jason sighed and motioned for her to sit down on the bed. She hesitated, but the need to know won out over her anger and stubbornness, and she sat. He pulled a file out of his bag and handed it to her silently.

She opened it and saw that it was filled with pictures. Some featured the two of them, eating dinner, shopping, completely oblivious to the surveillance. But most of them were of her alone and she was almost never alone. The photographer has managed to catch her leaving work, walking into a bar, stepping into a cab, making a withdrawal from an ATM. She realized that these photos had been taken over the span of at least six months; she recognized four different cities that they'd been in. "They've been following us since Prague." She looked at Jason. "How did we not know?"

"Because no one _was_ following us." She frowned at his answer and went back over the photos and realized that every single one had been taken from existing footage; traffic cameras, surveillance cameras outside stores, the camera installed in the ATM that she had used. _This is worse._

"Who? Who has access to this stuff- other than… us?" Whoever had accessed these cameras, had certainly done so illegally and very discretely. The FBI would have left a paper trail a mile wide and they still had contacts that would have alerted them. The CIA could have done it, but they were already well aware of their location and wouldn't have needed to resort to spying on them like this. Treadstone and Black Briar were long defunct.

That left a foreign espionage group. Someone had hacked their nation's security grid and used it to tail them. So that left two questions; who and why. "What do they want?"

She let the pictures fall onto the bed and turned her attention to the remaining piece of paper. It was folded neatly in half and contained only a single chilling sentence, followed by a date and coordinates.

"She is welcome to stay with us as a guest again if you are unable to attend in her place."

She dropped the paper and stood up, unconsciously distancing herself from the note, then stumbled towards the bathroom door. She felt sick.

Jason caught her. "I'm not going to let them hurt you. They won't get anywhere near you. Nicky. Listen to me. I'm going to find them. I'm going to kill them."

"No. We have to run. Jason. We have to get away." Her fight or flight reflex had fixated on the running. It wasn't safe to engage these people. Running was the only option that made any sense to her.

But Jason had had more time to process things and he was able to see the situation more clearly than she could in her current panicked state. "We can't run. They've shown us that they'll find us no matter where we go." He held her out at arm's length and searched her face for some acknowledgement of the truth he was telling her. "If I don't go, they'll find us and they'll take you."

"I'm the one they really want but they knew I wouldn't cooperate unless they had some sort of leverage. Let me go and see what they want." He dropped his voice to a whisper. "They haven't realized what a huge mistake they've made. I'll kill every last one of them."

* * *

**What do you think? Worth continuing? I wrote this a whome ago but never published it. Leave a review if you think it's worth it. **


End file.
